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apostolakisl

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Everything posted by apostolakisl

  1. The white wires are always neutral. It is a big time code violation to do it otherwise. So unless this was a DIY wiring job by somehow who seriously didn't know what they were doing, your whites are neutral, except for where you connected red to white, that is a code violation and you should undo that splice. Yes, there are two travelers in a 3 way, but the red will for sure is a traveler. The blacks can be a traveler, hot or load. The way I told you to wire it, you only need to identify the hot, the others will by default end up connecting as needed.
  2. First off, red and white should never be spliced together. Steps: 1) Find the hot. - turn off breaker - disconnect every black wire from every other black wire at each box. - turn on breaker - use volt meter to find which of the blacks is hot by touching one lead to each black and the other to a ground or neutral wire - turn off breaker 2) For simplicity, use the red traveler wire as your hot at box without native hot. Splice red to hot wire. Now red at box 2 is hot. 3) Connect red at box without native hot to hot on insteon switch. 4) Connect red/black spliced wires to hot on insteon swith at hot box. 5) One of your remaining unconnected blacks is the load wire. You don't need to figure out which it is. Just splice all the currently unused blacks together and splice one of the two insteon switches to it at either box (not both of them, just one). Cap them all off. 6) Splice your Insteon Neutrals to whites at each box 7) Splice your Insteon grounds to house ground at each box Breaker back on.
  3. I have two of the Elk WSV's. They are built like a brick S*** house. One at my office and one at home. They spin in an endless circle for on/off/on/off. They have cams with set screws on a post that trigger micro-switches to know the position. These are adjustable if somehow they are not stopping at the proper locations. There is an indicator on it so you can see what position it is in at any given time. You can put a wrench on it and turn it manually if the motor should fail or there is a power issue. Everything I say here is based on my experience with the original Elk WSV, not the newer version.
  4. I am pretty sure you are correct on this. Just like electrical, you only own what is after the meter.
  5. After the irrigation. When you go out of town, I assume you will want your house water off but still wan't your grass to not die. I suppose you could program it to open while irrigating, but then you might just be irrigating the inside of your house for a couple hours in addition to your lawn.
  6. I'm not sure what this series of programs is doing besides setting a variable to the current temp.
  7. An always on PC could ping your phone once/minute then run a rest command to ISY when it changes state. You'd need to write scripts to do this which might take a while to figure out. Probably you could get a Rasberry Pi to do it also. Or you could go back to Android and use all the wonderful features of Tasker once again.
  8. http://wiki.universal-devices.com/index.php?title=ISY-99i_Series_INSTEON:Networking:Tasker
  9. I use tasker to set a variable on my isy when it is logged into my home wifi. I don't think ISY has a ping function, but could be wrong.
  10. They do make dimmable 12v transformers. The only question is whether they will work with such a tiny amp draw. The ones I am familiar with are intended for 12v halogen lights and thus are designed for a lot more watts than the draw of your leds.
  11. This is what I have at my office. https://forwardthinking.honeywell.com/new/50-9420.pdf I have two of these controlling two heat pumps with 3 zones on each (one zone not used). It does allow for multi stages of heat and cool, but my heat pumps are single stage. Though do have aux heat.
  12. I have used two brands. Rodgers White Honeywell Both used stock thermostats with standard thermostat wiring. They just call for cool or heat and the zone controller does the rest. EDIT: or fan of course too. There is no "I need cool really bad or I need just a little cool"
  13. When you say you have a "white" controller at the air handler, do you mean a Rodgers-White brand, or do you mean that is a box that is the color white? Rodgers-White zone controllers I have had follow the standard universal wiring scheme and accept any thermostat that also follows that standard. If the colors are confusing you, check the wires at the controller to know what wire is performing what function. There isn't really any fancy magic with a zone controller. It just accepts the instruction from the thermostat the same as the furnace would directly, except it also opens/closes the appropriate damper. The only other thing is that if one zone calls for heat and another calls for cool, it will put the one on hold until the other is finished.
  14. If your PLM is a bit older than 2 years, you are likely to find that it is only temporarily fixed. This is something that happens to PLM's that are on the brink.
  15. Is your PLM a bit over 2 years old? Is the green led on? If the answer is yes and no, you likely have a dead plm. See the PLM thread on this site for how to fix, or buy a new one. The power going on and off is probably not the problem, except that perhaps a small surge from that might have been the straw that broke it's already nearly broken back.
  16. This is a good question. I have only had one all on event, so perhaps I am not most qualified to characterize it. However, if you use if control . . . terminology, an all on event should not be an issue. I can tell you that I have the following program If control kpl button is switched on Then arm elk night mode and my all on event did not trigger that. I also have several other if control programs that do things like turn on the house music and what not and none of those ran either. I would be more careful with "is status" programs since I suppose that could trigger. I do not recall if ISY registered the change in status of all the devices or not during the all on event. I want to say yes, but I will not swear to it.
  17. If the lights pull 480 then they are using two phases of the three to get that. You would then need a relay. I have never heard of single phase 480.
  18. You are probably wrong to say what you just said. If your maintenance guy says you are on "480v" he probably means you are on 480v three phase. This means you have 3 phases of 277v. Cross two of those phases and you get 480v. Cross one phase to neutral you get 277v. If the lamps run on a single phase of the 480 service then the switch I listed above is specifically made for that.
  19. I would think that listing 277v means he is powering a single phase 277 device off of a 480v 3 phase wye service, not a 480v device and only interrupting one leg of it. The part about the load being inductive or resistive is good. Do they make 277v single phase motors though? Seems like anyone with 277v/480v available would want to take advantage of 3 phase since it would be better and cheaper. But we are making lots of assumptions here. Would be good to know the truth.
  20. http://www.smarthome.com/in-linelinc-relay-insteon-2475sdb-remote-control-in-line-on-off-switch-dual-band.html This is what you need, 277v 20 amp.
  21. Just an FYI. I am on my 3rd PLM. The first was the older model which I replaced about 4.5 years ago because. . . I don't remember why, the old PLM worked fine but it seems to me there was some issue with using the 2412 unit, maybe since it wasn't dual band. Anyway, the new 2413s that i bought 4.5 years ago lasted 2 years and 3 months. . . as you would expect from Smarthome. I replaced it with a new one and recapped the old one as a spare. Well the new one died at 2 years and 2 months just last week. In short, I have had 3 plms over the years and only one all on event. This was using my third plm, the one I bought 2 years and 2 months ago and while it still had its original caps. This happened about 2 years into its life (or in other words about 2 months ago). Could not quite dead yet caps be part of the problem? I restored that 4.5 year old plm with the new caps last week and it is working fine. I'll be recapping my just died plm as soon as they arrive from Mousser and keep it as a backup.
  22. The trouble with the all on is that I don't really think anyone actually knows for sure why it happens. It may be that there are multiple things that can do it. Which means you may think you fixed it, but there is no way to test that. I have had exactly one all on event in my system in 7 years. Nothing changed for a long time before it happened and I have changed nothing since. So how do you trouble shoot this and how do you know when you fixed it. I just don't trust Insteon to anything significant, I use Elk for all that stuff.
  23. If I were you I would get rid of the Insteon control of your GDO. Since you have Elk, use that, it is too important to trust your GDO to Insteon. I neglected to pull wires from my Elk to the GDO when the house was under construction, but there is a simple work around provided your Elk is within radio range of the GDO. I simply took one of my standard push button radio control GDO with 3 buttons on it and soldered leads to the 3 micro switches and then ran those to 3 relays on the elk. If you care to have ISY control your GDO and have the Elk module, this is now just a simple process of adding a program that turns the relay on for a second. ISY is not the problem, it is Insteon, and this takes Insteon out of the loop and replaces it with the far more reliable Elk.
  24. I have one and I assume it works, though it is hard to know what you didn't have happen. The one thing to realize is that surge suppressors only suppress surges originating outside the house, they don't block surges that originate from within the house. Specifically, when motors (like your refrigerator compressor) lose power they produce a surge. Normally this is not a problem because normally the reason the motor shuts off is that power to it is disconnected from the house power, but when the power to the house is cut, the connection between the motor is still connected to the house when it shuts off.
  25. Either that or you can put programs into folders that are activated/deactivated based on that variable. I also use the status of my elk. Some things are based on whether I am home, others on whether my wife is home, and others yet are based on if anyone is home.
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